The Nature of Sacrifice
by DezoPenguin
Summary: A military expedition unleashes a seething horde of fiends. Only a scientist and her half-demon creation might save a capital from being overrun. And Ruenheid Ariarhod, newly joined as a knight of the Lourdes Order, is given a prophecy to fulfill. Sacrifice, loss, and salvation will collide to define the fate of these three women.
1. Chapter 1

Eight hundred years ago, humanity lost the night.

It was never their natural time, of course. Humans were a visual species. They craved light, gathered most of their information through it, and while they could do without it for a time, or survive without it entirely as individuals, they depended on it for society, civilization, culture. The pale glow of the moon and stars that let nocturnal animals function was not enough, so to endure the dark they brought fire, from campfires and hearths to torches, lamps, and candles, pushing back in tiny increments.

Then came the Nightlord. The master of demons. All of humanity knew the story, of how he sought to drown the world in Eternal Night, and was struck down in battle by the First Saint Ludegert, sealing him away to save the world. The victory had not been without cost, however. The Nightlord's Blue Blood rained down over the world from his wounds, and every droplet wove its corruption into whatever it touched. People, animals, plants, even simple inanimate objects were infused with a force that was never meant to mingle, breeding a new form of life: the fiends. They prowled the darkness, preying upon any human they encountered. No amount of artificial light could slay the fiends; all humanity could do was to lurk away behind walls and gates and pray for the next dawn.

For all intents and purposes, Earth had become a land without night.

At least, thought Gregori Antonov, that was how it had been.

Several decades ago, though, something had changed. No one knew what, exactly, or if they did they weren't saying. Not the kings and presidents, not the priestesses of the Curia, not the blank-faced scientists in their mechanical hellscapes. But it was there nonetheless, a subtle shift, as if some driving presence had been taken away from the Night. As desperate as things were, humans had begun to _win_ , to gain here and there, to drench their roads and boulevards in light and walk fiend-free, above all to dream of a day where the night would be theirs to walk once again.

 _Or else I wouldn't be out here_ , he thought. The darkness was cold and cloying, and his weapons gave him little comfort.

He glanced to his left, knowing what he'd see before he looked. As always, Vladimir Konin's face was wreathed in an eager, toothy smile. Action was his _raison d'etre_ , the desire to visit violence on the fiends. Antonov had heard the gossip, that Konin's family had been killed by fiends in his childhood and he was taking revenge, but even after ten years working side-by-side with the man, Antonov had no idea if the story was the truth.

Around them, the other eight men and women of his unit had fanned out in a loose arc surrounding their target, the mouth of a crevice leading to a cleft in the hillside that a nest of fiends had made their home. They'd been tracked back, and now it was time for the humans to strike a blow. Antonov knew any meaningful gain would be more symbolic than tangible; a handful of fiends slain might mean a few lives saved but very little in the larger scheme of things. Rather, it was the act that mattered: taking back even a tiny fragment of the night.

Antonov drew his knife. The blade was edged with silver, fifteen inches long—nearly a sword. It glinted in the moonlight as he gestured. Past Konin, Irina Nazarova raised a metal tube to her shoulder and fired, a spitting, smoking projectile arcing out with a dull _whump!_ of compressed gases released. The fuse-bomb vanished into the crevice, and seconds later detonated with a brilliant flash. Even obscured by the rock walls as it was, the flare was still stunningly bright to dark-adjusted eyes.

At once, a cacophony of howls rose, punctuated by yelps and angry growls at the hated light. As expected, the fiends began to emerge, surging out of the narrow crevice. Antonov's soldiers fired their pistols into the seething mass, taking advantage of the bottleneck so three or four could put silver bullets into a fiend, then reload while the next group took the next fiend. Though the fiends' bodies looked like they were largely made from writhing shadow, Blue Blood sprayed from bullet wounds as if the silver slugs had punctured flesh.

Three fiends fell, then four, then five, but they kept coming with an unrelenting drive. That was the terrible thing about them, the insatiable chaos and violence of their demonic transformation made fear or self-preservation almost beyond them. Once aroused, they were consumed by the endless urge to devour.

Antonov fired his fourth shot, realized there was no time to reload for a fifth, and holstered his gun. Being able to shoot left-handed gave him precious seconds as his blade was already at the ready. Then it was knife-work, stabbing and slashing while fending off swipes of forepaws like clawed hands and snapping teeth set in bony muzzles.

It was ugly, savage business. The yelps and screams of the fiends combined with the grunts and war-cries of the fighters—and more than once their cries of pain as the fiends worked past their guard. Antonov's soldiers were all taught to fight fiends at least two-to-one—better three or four—and yet it seemed that they _could not_ , that the fiends were boiling out of the crevice too fast. Worse, with each step that the soldiers had to give ground, there was more room for the fiends to get out, to escape the bottleneck.

 _Good God, how many of them_ are _there?_

He hacked and stabbed with desperate focus, but Antonov's peripheral awareness told him of the things going on around him. Nazarova going down, he belly torn open by the monsters. The fresh-faced young Rozovskaya writhing as Blue Blood splattered her face, the demonic essence burrowing into her eyes, the membranes of her nose and mouth, and how Konin ripped his knife across her throat to give her a clean death before she could be corrupted into a fiend.

They were going to lose. All ten of them would end here, one way or another, before this hellish army.

A grim satisfaction came as the word "army" crossed his mind. Humanity had risen beyond "prey," hadn't they? They were forcing Eternal Night to wage _war_.

 _Even if it is a war we cannot win,_ Antonov thought as the shadowed tide consumed him.

~X X X~

There was an anger that seethed beneath the skin of Ruenheid Ariarhod every time she walked the halls of her new home. It showed in the sharp, staccato clicks of her hard-heeled boots off the ancient Roman tiles, in the stiffness of her arms and shoulders, in her tight-lipped, intent expression. Ruenheid wore her emotions openly and (at least so far as the less tender ones went) without shame.

The headquarters of the Lourdes Order lay beneath the fallen capital of Eurulm. The city was where Ruenheid had grown up, the seat of her prestigious family's estates and authority, where she had made her memories with her dearest friends. Now it lay abandoned by humans, left to fiends that prowled its alleys, crawled from its canals and lake. She could not help but think that just a dozen feet above her, the cradle of her past lay in the hands of monsters, as it had for the past three years.

 _One day,_ she thought firmly. _One day, we will sweep these streets clean again._

As always, though, that anger dimmed when Ruenheid walked through the arch at the end of the corridor and into the high, pillared hall. There were no furnishings there, just a large, rectangular pool of water, a lustrous blue in color. The pool was ancient; some days Ruenheid thought it had once been part of a Roman bath, while other days the fanciful thought possessed her that it was some oracular mystery, descending to untold depths.

The room had only one other occupant, a woman with hair as gold as Ruenheid's own that sat on the far side of the pool, her bare feet dangling in the water. Her dress was long and white, leaving her shoulders bare. The strip of dark cloth that ran from collar to waistline then fell freely was sewn with a criss-crossing pattern in gold that made Ruenheid think of the links of a chain, and the way it dipped into the water called to mind the image of some Delphic priestess chained to her duty. It was an image easy to call to mind, emphasized by the very real bindings she wore, the strip of cloth over her eyes, the brass fetters chaining her ankles, the leather strap holding her legs. At a glance, she seemed the very picture of enslaved frailty.

Nothing could have been further from the truth.

"Lady Loergwlith, I have come as you asked," Ruenheid said, bowing deeply at the waist. The ghost of a smile played at the blind woman's lips, and Ruenheid blushed, afraid that her formality had somehow made her look ridiculous.

 _Damn it, why do I have to be so self-conscious?_ she blazed at herself.

"Thank you, Ruenheid; I know that I can count on you."

"Of course!"

There were those who might have called Ruenheid a traitor. Her family, after all, had given loyal and diligent service to the Curia for generations, and she herself had enrolled in Espheria Academy to be trained as a Holy Knight, one of the front-line fighters against Eternal Night—only to abandon that duty to join the Lourdes Order, the Curia's open rival. One might expect that a girl who so fiercely carried her pride as a noble and a knight would feel the weight of all her forebears' discontent at her actions—but she did not. On the contrary, Ruenheid was convinced that the past generations of Ariarhods would applaud—no, would _demand_ her actions.

"I have need of your sword, Ruenheid. It will be arduous, but if you succeed, it will save countless lives."

"It would be my honor," Ruenheid declared, then winced at how pompous she sounded even to her own ears. Again, the smile danced across Loergwlith's lips.

"Be at ease, Rue," she said, even her chiding carrying kindness.

"I…just want you to know that you can trust me to serve as your knight," Ruenheid said. She looked down and away, unable to meet Loergwlith's "gaze" even though the woman's eyes were blinded and bound.

"As I do, more than I think you know. But it is not the strength of your arm that I need—though that, too, will be put to the test. It is the strength of your heart."

Ruenheid's eyebrows rose.

"I don't understand."

"You will, in time. I need you to go east. There, you will find…"

~X X X~

Stefan Ilyich slammed the wood-and-brass handset of the phone down into its cradle. He took one deep, ragged breath, then two, a faint tremble running through his limbs. There was fear there, and anger, but most of all a savage frustration.

Colonel Ilyich did not like feeling helpless. Indeed, he gave off the impression of being a man who knew no such emotion: tall, strong-jawed, erect posture, close-cut gray hair, and sharply pressed uniform. But that impression was a lie, for like any man, he knew the feeling all too well. As a youth he had proudly denied it, declaring that in the face of trouble or opposition he would win through in the end, believing in his deepest heart that so long as his spirit was pure and his effort unyielding no loss could touch him.

Thirty years ago he'd had that pitiful delusion ripped from him when he'd watched his wife, his Natalya, die beneath the jaws of a fiend. Ilyich had emptied his weapon into the thing as it pounced, and it had had no effect—none, that is, but to spill the fiend's Blue Blood, so that it splashed across the body of their youngest child as Natalya had tried to shield little Sasha from the fiend.

Ilyich still heard the screams when all power, all hope was denied him. Silencing that voice was what had driven him relentlessly, fuelled his ambition for himself and his command for three decades. There was no silencing those haunting echoes now.

He fished in his pocket for a thin black cigar and his gold lighter. The flame shook with his hand as he lit the tobacco, but he took two long, slow drags, the harsh, bitter smoke helping to calm his reeling mind. Better. Ilyich turned, took two quick steps to the table and unrolled a map from one of the several stacked at the edge. It wasn't the one he wanted, so he swept it to the floor and unrolled a second.

There.

He could not trust the hysterical panic of the officer who'd relayed the scouts' reports to him. The facts, yes, but not the conclusions. If there was hope to be extracted, it was in keeping a cool head.

Ilyich had written down the details phoned in to him, and now he plotted those details on the map. Times, places. The conclusion was inevitable. The horde of fiends had already overcome two villages and a platoon of hunters. That fool Belikov had thrown a company of conventional soldiers in their path to no effect at all, as if steel and powder could lay the Night. In two days they would reach the city. Perhaps the defense would hold, perhaps not, but either way the death toll would be horrific. Evacuation was a pipe dream; there was no time to organize—

 _Wait._

Ilyich looked down at the map, studying the path made by the creatures. He—and the man who'd reported in—had based their assumptions on the fiends following the terrain, but that wasn't right, was it? _Here_ they had crossed right over a ridge line no human force would pass, while _there_ they had turned aside and taken the _harder_ route. But to avoid…what?

No. Not to avoid.

To _consume._

These fiends were not waging a military campaign. They were more like a swarm of hungry locusts, driven to the human fodder they craved. They would _not_ reach the city in two days. They would reach it in _four_ , because they would turn aside twice along the way.

He checked the map again, to be sure there was no mistake. He measured the distance along the river, ran through the calculations in his head. It would be hard going, doubtless.

Colonel Ilyich's teeth bit down unconsciously, cutting through the cigar. Hard going, but _not_ impossble.

He spun on his heel, heading for the door. The echoing screams were—for now—snuffed out.

~X X X~

"Damn it to a thousand hells!"

Dr. Katya Travnikova was not what one would call a _spiritual_ woman. That was perhaps an oddity, given that her principal fields of study were the fiends and literal demons of the Eternal Night. But not for her were the pomp and circumstance, the ceremony of the Curia. If there was such a thing as God, surely He was a cold and remote entity who was inclined to leave His children to help themselves, and Katya had no interest in wasting her time on pleas that would go unanswered.

That didn't stop her from wishing the blood sample on her microscope's slide to the deepest pit of flames.

 _Another failure_.

This was what came of rushing things. Of pushing for results before they were sure of the underlying principles. Oh, they had had successes, breakthroughs, even _glorious_ ones, but…

They were dealing with the Blue Blood. There were no easy answers, and the victories were all written in someone's pain and suffering.

She looked up at the six-foot-tall tank, glowing from within from the luminescent green fluid.

"I'm sorry."

Katya massaged her temples. Her aching eyes and throbbing skull were clear signs that she was pushing herself too hard. But what else was there? Like everyone else on the project staff, she'd made her choice. No, choices, even if she'd been too deep in the sunk costs fallacy to recognize them as such at the time. That was a hard trap for anyone to escape, let alone where the "sunk costs" were measured in human lives. And now she really was out of choices. Only success and failure remained.

Except thus far there was no "or," just the bitter pill of failure and inevitable loss to swallow.

The creak of heavy door hinges and the echoing clang of fast-moving steps on the laboratory's metal floor gave her respite from her self-recriminations with another emotion.

"Why are you disturbing me?" she growled, spinning to face the intruder. She was gearing up for a blistering stream of invective, but snapped her mouth shut when she saw who it was. "I beg your pardon, Colonel Ilyich," she forced herself to say.

He didn't so much brush her outburst and apology aside as he ignored them completely.

"Dr. Travnikoka, how are things progressing?"

"I am making progress. I believe that we are on the verge of another sustaining breakthrough." It was not entirely a lie; there had been some productive hints in the prior battery of experiments, even if they had not yet led to anything.

"That is good. I hope it will allow you to conduct the necessary maintenance when the next operation is through."

"I hope so, too. I will keep you apprised of our progress, and let you know when we are ready to proceed."

The Colonel shook his head.

"That is not what I meant. The next operation begins at once."

"That's impossible!"

"It is fact. I need her in Mirny no later than three days from now."

"You can't be serious! I've told you that field operations are out of the question until I've found a way to stabilize the deterioration of her organs. Using her abilities only accelerates the process. She could be irreparably harmed by a field mission."

Ilyich exhaled sharply.

"Then that is the risk we must take."

"Why? What political point is being scored? Which ministers needed a favor to keep funding the Special Operations (Anti-Fiend) Group?"

"This is not about politics!" he shouted, and Katya flinched at the heat in his voice. Ilyich's expression softened at once and he reached out to grip her shoulder in an attempt at reassurance. "I do not order this lightly," he said, making sure by his word choice that she did not misunderstand and think he was in any way _asking_. "There is a veritable army of fiends moving northward. If they are not stopped, they will reach the capital, and the death toll will be in the thousands—if we are lucky. The only hope is that they will move off the direct route for the purpose of seeking closer prey. In three days, I calculate that they will reach Mirny. That is enough time for Veruschka to get there."

"And then? Alone against an army of fiends?"

"This is why you worked so hard on this project, isn't it, Ekaterina Sergevna? The politicians, the generals, they wanted to create a half-demon warrior for their own purposes, a weapon to hold over other nations, perhaps even the Curia itself, but not you. For you, the half-demon was for one thing only: to kill the Night and all its creations."

A long, ragged breath ran through her. She knew he was right, she _knew_ it, and yet…

"All right," she said. "Three days. We can make it. We get her on the train, have her taken as close as possible, then finish the trip on the ground."

"Taken? Why not just send her?"

"The deterioration of her body is too advanced. If you want her to be at her best in battle, we need to keep her under maintenance until the last possible chance. Plus, if we can get her back into the capsule and under stasis immediately following the battle it will maximize our ability to make further repairs."

"Do you think that will be possible?"

"I don't know. I have no idea of the specifics of the battle or her likelihood of surviving it," Katya pointed out. _Information_ was what she needed. The accuracy of scientific conclusions rested upon reliable data. "But a battle against the number of fiends you suggest will cause the absorption of far too much Blue Blood to be easily handled. The stress it will place on her system will be immense. I have to try to stabilize her as soon as possible and make the necessary adjustments if there's to be any hope of saving her."

"You? You're not a fighter. You can't go into a combat zone!"

"Veruschka is my masterpiece! She's the only successful half-demon we've been able to create. I'm not just going to abandon her. Besides, you know that her death could cost us months of research towards her replacements, to say nothing of the price to field operations. You know that the project committee would back me up on this."

Colonel Ilyich scowled.

"I can't allow—"

"You know it's the best way. We're willing to risk Veruschka to save the lives of thousands, and I should be willing to face risk as well, for the sake of the future. Or what if the next time there is no Veruschka?"

The colonel's upper lip quivered, but Katya knew the man. There was only one decision it was possible for him to reach.

"Fine. Go. But keep yourself from trouble as best you can. Your role is support, not to bloody your hands."

"I will remember," she said. But as she thought of the past, of what had been done already to make Veruschka what she was, all she could think was, _How wrong you are, Father._

~X X X~

 _A/N: I can only hope to have gotten Russian names, patronymics, surnames, and nicknames anywhere near correct, and I apologize in advance for any errors. As for Mirny, I picked that name on the one hand for the fictional town that will be the battle site because there is more than one Mirny in reality, and because I'd read that the name means "peaceful," which if true is suitably ironic._


	2. Chapter 2

" _Go to the village of Mirny._

 _There, you will find a scientist_

 _who has brought her creation_

 _to battle fiends. Save her, and_

 _you will save thousands of lives."_

~X X X~

The soldiers of the Special Operations (Anti-Fiend) Group sent with Katya were a dour lot, men and women alike saying very little. Their faces, whether young and fresh or as old as the Colonel, held the same tight expressions, their mouths the same sour twist of the lips.

They understood what they were heading into.

Most of them were experienced in fighting fiends. They'd gone into the field on multiple missions, tested their weapons and charms. They'd watched friends and comrades die alongside them, win or lose. They'd fought in significant victories and they'd retreated from desperate losses. But in every previous sortie, they'd gone out with _hope._ They'd expected to destroy their enemy, even if the cost was high.

Not this time.

Every man and woman knew what they were facing. Colonel Ilyich had at least done them that courtesy: to tell them the truth about the mission and their odds. The human soldiers were, at their core, little more than living shields for Veruschka, their purpose solely to be pieces on a bloody chessboard to give shape to the battle in any way they could.

Conversation between them was minimal, confined largely to the details of the operation. On the first day, drinking was common, bottles of whiskey and vodka emptied in one last toast to the lives they expected to leave behind, to the people and principles they felt were worth their sacrifices. On the second day, though, the liquor was put away, as if by unspoken agreement. No one would go into battle either drunk or hung over; no matter how resigned they were, they were not willing to give back even the most slender fragment of a chance.

Katya wished that she had even that tiny fragment to believe in.

The train had brought them to within a four-hour drive from Mirny, the troops marching on foot while their gear and heavier equipment was loaded into sturdy dray-wagons pulled by hugely-muscled horses. One of those wagons was nearly filled by the coffin-like steel chamber that contained Veruschka. Through the double-thick window, her face could be seen, looking for all the world like a sleeping girl, barely more than a child. The bright green fluid that filled the chamber, held in place by the rubberized seals at every jointure, distorted the colors so that the true picture was obscured, but the impression still came through. More than one of the soldiers had glanced through the panel and for just an instant had let a flicker of pity show.

It never failed to infuriate Katya.

Not because of the sentiment itself. Oh, there was a thread of that, towards the hypocrisy of those who would have hated and despised Veruschka, a half-demon _thing,_ but put that aside only because she looked like a vulnerable young girl. But that wasn't the main part. After all, wasn't the first step in defeating any prejudice to get the other person to see one as a human, an individual, and _not_ a thing? No, Katya didn't get angry because they pitied Veruschka.

What incited her fury, an emotion she was only able to force down by brute force of will and because of the mission at hand, was that they pitied her for the wrong reasons.

 _They_ saw a girl being sent into battle, a child soldier being asked to fight and die for concepts that were surely beyond her. They wanted to let her stay home, stay safe, that one so young should not be forced into this suicidal operation.

The reality was, they should have saved their pity for when she had been taken into the program as a test subject.

The drugs, the surgeries, everything that had been done to Veruschka to prepare her for the Blue Blood, to become her nation's champion against the fiends.

"Why is she like that?" one of the officers had asked when Veruschka was first loaded aboard. "Why not simply have her walk? It just creates more trouble to haul her along like this."

"Do you want her to waste her strength _walking_?" Katya had shot back at him. "Her body is unstable as it is. Every hour that she is forced to operate on her own is another chance for a complete breakdown. She comes out at the last possible moment, and not before."

Put it off as she would, though, that moment came with bitter inevitability.

They'd based themselves in the village's church. It was of simple stone construction, possibly three hundred years old, and largely plain in décor, though brightly painted and gilt icons and triptychs lent spots of color and the scent of incense hung in the air. Though the great brass censers had been extinguished, it was as if the scent had permeated the very stone over the decades, providing a constant underlayer to the ruder, fresher scents of gun oil and harsh tobacco.

Katya wanted to be sick.

Most of the pews had been pushed to the walls to prepare a better staging ground, while others had been pulled into crude defensive barriers. The priest was nowhere in sight. Perhaps he was offering support to his flock as they tried to find shelter against the coming storm, or perhaps he had merely fled in terror. Katya couldn't guess, and in truth she couldn't bring herself to care.

They'd put Veruschka's coffin-chamber in front of the altar, at Katya's direction. The captain had looked at her oddly for a second, then offered a thin-lipped, rueful smile.

"Fitting, I suppose. We're all of us sacrifices."

"It's an open, well-lit place to work without having any of the rest of you trip into me," Katya had snapped back. He hadn't deserved it, even if the death of soldiers meant relatively little compared to the death of knowledge—

Her nails bit into her palms.

 _Stop lying to yourself._

Veruschka wasn't knowledge. Oh, there was more to be gained from her, from their only success. Models and failures could teach, but at some point experiments had to work in order for there to be further steps.

She pressed switches and turned dials. Cogs creaked. Pneumatic pressure caused suction, generated flow. The fluid receded, drained into attached tanks, replaced by injected air. She turned the handle. Springs popped, breaking seals. Secondary springs and counterweights gave the additional force for Katya to swing the coffin-lid open.

She looked down at a child.

Technically that wasn't true. Veruschka was sixteen years old. The slender, whipcord build, the pixie face, the mop of blueberry hair that retained its wave despite being cut close, these all made her look younger than her years, but it was a struggle for Katya to think that a third of girls her age might well be married. The relationship of doctor to patient, scientist to subject, had sufficient echoes of that of parent to young child to finish the effect.

The eyes that opened and looked up at Katya, though, were not childlike. They lacked a child's innocence, an adult's wisdom, a fiend's hatred, or a demon's passion. Their expression was blank, empty.

A soulless machine.

"Dr. Travnikova. What is my mission?"

Her voice was low, calm, controlled.

"This is the village of Mirny. A large army of fiends is believed to be approaching. You will destroy as many of them as possible. These soldiers are here to assist you tactically. Use their services to preserve your life and enable you to inflict as much total damage as possible."

"Understood."

She sat up, then stood, stepping out of the coffin. She showed no embarrassment or even awareness of the thin fabric she wore, framed by tubes and wires. The maintenance garment was based upon samples of a ritual outfit stolen from the Curia, something that they made use of in their own half-demon program to assist in controlling the absorption and extraction of Blue Blood. Veruschka began to remove it, and Katya turned her head. She saw that a couple of the soldiers were doing the same, while a few more were stealing glances, but the majority were as impassive towards the whole thing as Veruschka herself.

They recognized the truth, after all. A half-demon was not a woman; she had been made into a weapon.

This fact was only emphasized by the outfit she donned—a plain dark blue leather bodysuit. The color was for nighttime camouflage, the material for sturdiness, the lack of frills or adornment to keep anything from hampering her in battle even as the fabric inserts at the joints were to allow for an unobstructed full range of motion.

Katya wished, sometimes, that Veruschka might express a desire for something brighter, more fashionable or whimsical, but she never questioned the wardrobe she was given any more than she questioned anything else.

Once Veruschka had dressed, Katya opened a steel case and gave her her weapons. Intelligence reports suggested that the Curia's half-demon program had managed to produce a subject capable of manifesting a weapon from her own blood, just as a true demon did, but Veruschka had never displayed that ability, nor had Katya encouraged her to try. The three subjects who'd been able to do so had almost immediately succumbed to their Blue Blood; their current technology did not seem capable of maintaining the demonic blood at such an active level and still controlling it.

Instead, they'd built weapons for her, things different than the guns and blades of the soldiers. Like the weapons of the Curia Agents that drew on their trained spiritual energy, Veruschka's stake drivers took advantage of her enhanced strength and stamina. Their basic nature was a simple punch dagger, one for each hand, their grip charmed to draw out the Blue Blood, lending the blades their azure sheen and giving them potency beyond anything technology could offer. But in addition, mounted below each blade was the apparatus for a second spike, only this one mounted in a launcher that explosively thrust the stake forward with more force than even Veruschka's arm could manage. It wasn't a missile weapon, but more akin to a power tool.

As always, Veruschka gave each stake driver a quick inspection before slipping her hands around their grips. Methodical and exacting, as always.

Just how they'd made her.

"Do you have any further instructions, Doctor?" she asked.

Katya sighed.

"No, that's all." She wished that there _was_ more, something she could offer beyond simply _hunt, kill_.

It was the detachment's commander, Captain Cherkasov, who supplied what the doctor could not.

"The army of fiends is progressing towards the capital," he told her. "It's not enough to just kill many of them. They must be turned aside. Whether that is by wiping them out to the last one or routing them so that they scatter and go their separate ways, their cohesion has to be broken or this mission fails. You should keep that in mind at all times."

"Understood."

She turned to look at the captain.

"Are you prepared?"

"As anyone can be, to walk to their death."

"Is that an affirmative response?" From most people, that would have been sarcasm or mockery. The captain had worked with the Group long enough, though, to understand that it was meant as nothing more than a literal question.

He understood why, too, which was the reason for the sharp look he gave Katya.

She didn't object. She wasn't blind to her own actions, and besides, what was the point of arguing with a dead man?

"Yes, Veruschka, we're ready."

"Very well. Let us deploy. Please summarize the weapons and equipment of your troops so that I can better coordinate with you."

They left the room, still talking with machine-like precision and efficiency, the only language that the half-demon appreciated.

Only when the troops had gone did Kayta at last allow the tears to come.

~X X X~

As a splinter group, the Lourdes Order did not have the resources of the Curia. Ruenheid had access neither to their special carriages with their tireless drivers, nor the ability granted by international treaty to ignore national borders and checkpoints. Though that latter right had been eroding over the past decades since the death of the last Pope to reign singly, a Knight of the Curia on a fiend-hunting mission would not have been stayed in her work.

Instead, Ruenheid had been forced to travel by train as far as possible, them make her border crossing in inconvenient fashion. Stealth was not the noble swordswoman's forte to approximately the same degree as flight was not a penguin's.

She couldn't help but think of her friends from school when she pretended to disembark at the last stop before the border (so that the conductor's head count wouldn't reveal a stowaway), then leapt to the top of a car once she was not being watched. What would Aluche have thought to see her, clinging in undignified fashion to a metal outcrop while lying as flat as possible to reduce the chances of any station officials seeing her.

 _That thick-skulled girl probably wouldn't have even thought of being embarrassed,_ Rue grumbled in her mind. The idea of explaining an Ariarhod's dignity and poise, of the example she was supposed to set for others, the things bred into Ruenheid's bones, would be like trying to chip away stone with a rubber mallet. _And if by some miracle Aluche_ did _understand, she'd probably just say something like "Yeah, but it's not like you'd ever get caught up in that stuff when it's about seeing justice done, right, Rue?"_ And then Ruenheid would blush like a maiden at her first ball because she couldn't help herself no matter how hard she tried when Aluche would talk like that, and then Liliana would put her knuckle to her lips and giggle into her fist at her friends' antics…

With a wash of embarrassment, Ruenheid realized that she was blushing _then_ , just from imagining it.

The passenger in the compartment just below her heard the anguished groan and shivered the whole trip through, afraid that a fiend had boarded the train.

~X X X~

There was nothing funny, though, about the siege of Mirny.

The fiends came seething out of the forests, wolves that were more shadow than beast flowing over the ground, together with their great cousins that walked on two legs. They boiled up out of the shadows of mountain rocks, squirming fungoid creatures and towering giants twice a man's height. Then there were stranger forms, almost laughable at first glance: giant queen bees with literal crowns, fish swimming through the air, weird wheeled things like the mating of a unicycle, a melon, and a howitzer.

No one laughed.

The soldiers engaged first, at long range. Their snipers used large-caliber rifles capable of accurate fire at over a mile distant. Hollow-point bullets made of silver and filled with holy oil punched into targets. Anything less than a lethal hit provoked a spark of bitter despair; the ammunition was simply too expensive to waste, too precious to spend wantonly without knowledge of the Curia's processes.

They gave way as the fiendish tide approached, falling back as pre-set explosives detonated, incendiaries unleashing cleansing fire. Dozens of fiends were killed in the blast, dozens more set aflame, the alchemical fire clinging and burning with all the fury of humanity's wrath.

Still the fiends came.

The incendiaries did their work in another way. Buildings were obstacles to humans, but not to half or more of the fiends who could scramble or fly over. With buildings turning to pillars of flame, though, it was a different story. The fiends were hedged in, funneled into paths. Small-arms fire cracked out, piercing the fiends with less lethality per shot but a greater rate of fire than the snipers' rounds. Hurled grenades added to the mix, not just with more incendiary blasts but also other compounds dreamed up by Katya's laboratory colleagues, ranging from noxious poisons to electricity-producing compounds.

Then, when the fiends' coordination was shattered, the humans struck in close range.

Some of them had rudimentary training similar to that of the Knights of the Curia, the ability to tap their spiritual power and channel it into strength, speed, and resilience. These knights were the elite of the elite, the product of rigorous training and cultivation, of practices dating back centuries. Next to them, the soldiers were little more than apprentices or squires. But still, they tore into the fiends with reckless, relentless abandon. They knew their time was limited, but they were determined to take as many fiends as possible with them before they fell. Nor were their untrained comrades any less driven, wielding their silver sabres and pikes with quiet desperation.

The Blue Blood was a constant hazard. Their uniforms had been designed to shed it as much as possible, but nothing afforded complete security from the Nightlord's essence. At least a quarter of the casualties that the soldiers took had been left writhing, twisting, as bones cracked and flesh re-knit itself into the image of the Night.

And in the heart of it all, there was Veruschka.

She struck at the moment when the largest group of fiends was most off-balance, bounding from one rooftop to the next, flames licking hungrily at her ankles but unable to find purchase before she was gone again, and she leapt, descending from above. Her blades tore into her unsuspecting prey, sending fiends bursting into sprays of Blue Blood before they were even aware of her presence, clearing space for her landing.

Even as the fiends turned towards her, she drove her blades into the ground and called on her own Blue Blood. Though she could not extrude it into a weapon, Katya had helped her to develop a technique where she could blast out a surge of it in a grenade-like effect in an arc in front of her. The scientist had called the technique "Slow," thinking that it would be useful to stun groups of fiends so that Veruschka could follow up with her weapons to finish staggered enemies, but she'd underestimated the power of her creation's demonic energies. The weaker fiends in the area of effect were ripped apart, and Veruschka sprang to slash down two badly injured dire wolves who'd been left standing alone in the suddenly empty space.

The fiends turned and reacted to the new, sudden threat at once. Most of them were barely more intelligent than animals, following the pulse of stronger wills or called as if by a siren to human fear and pain. Now they felt fear of their own, and surged to destroy the threat. Veruschka responded at once, though, ducking out of the way of searing bolts of fire, slashing a mushroom fiend before it could spray out poisonous spores, cutting down shadows in mid-pounce. Her Blue Blood hummed through her veins with every twist, kick, or slash, lending that extra power she needed and making her strikes land on a plane that was more than physical.

And fiends died.

There was nothing violent or ferocious in her fighting style. Even the most human-like of the fiends possessed it, be it fury or hunger or a savage joy in causing harm. Demons were creatures of elemental emotion, driven by their passions in a way very few humans achieved. Their lesser cousins, the fiends, were no different. But the half-demon hunter could as well have been a machine. No matter the intensity of the fight, the effort she had to expend to defeat her foe, she maintained her focused precision. The heat of battle never seemed to touch her, no matter how the Blue Blood burned in her veins with a cold, seething anger at the monsters she slew.

That was how Katya and her colleagues had made her, after all.

~X X X~

The _sturm und drang_ of war had not yet reached the church. The sounds, most certainly: the detonations of explosives, the roar of flames, the sharp cracks of gunfire, the howls of fiends, and the screams of human victims all echoed from all around, filtering through the walls and diffusing so that their precise direction was impossible to discern. Flames outside the stained glass windows lit up their night-darkened surfaces with occasional flashes of green, scarlet, and gold, emphasizing the weird isolation the building seemed to provide.

Katya found that made the stress even worse.

She'd been pacing, fretting, chain-smoking for the better part of an hour, now, ever since the first sounds of battle had begun.

"Damn it all!"

She yanked the cigarette from her lips, threw it on the floor, and ground it out with a savage twist of her boot-heel.

"Doctor, take it easy."

The young woman who spoke was the single bodyguard Cherkasov had left behind to keep watch over Katya. Even that slender sacrifice from the battle force was too much under the circumstances, which made Katya suspect the captain's motives in leaving her.

That suspicion made Katya round on her with more vehemence than she might otherwise have done.

"'Take it easy'? And exactly how am I supposed to 'take it,' then, am I?" She jabbed a finger at the door. "Veruschka is out there, fighting for all our sakes."

"As are my comrades, my entire unit."

Katya snarled.

"Support. You know as well as I do that the force we're facing won't be stopped by ordinary arms. But Veruschka wasn't designed to operate for this long."

"You make her sound like a machine."

"If she was, it would be a blessing. Containing the Blue Blood for such a time is beyond all human ability. It feeds on the emotions, drives them out of control. And if her body is constantly absorbing and processing additional Blue Blood from defeated fiends…Oh, bloody _hell_ , why am I sitting here _talking_ to you?"

Katya spun on her heel and all but ran to where her equipment was piled. She pulled a steel case out of the stack and flipped back the catches, revealing a gun-like injector, a frame designed to fit comfortably in the hand while driving a needle into flesh and delivering the contents of a vial. Lifting out the padded top layer, she revealed a second compartment with two such vials, each filled with a viscous lavender fluid. One of the vials she slotted into the injector; the other she wrapped up in her gloves for padding and shoved into her coat picket.

"What are you doing?"

"I just told you. Veruschka won't be able to process the influx of Blue Blood on her own. _Damn it!_ It may already be too late!" _No_ , she corrected herself inaudibly, _the noise of battle proves it's not. The soldiers wouldn't be able to hold out this long without her._ "This should stabilize her." _Maybe._ "At least until I can get her back into the chamber and ship her back to the lab for more maintenance."

"You say that like you think any of us are leaving here. You yourself are the only one with a chance."

Kayta ground her teeth together.

"Those were your orders, then? To get me out of here when the fighting gets too hot?"

"They were the Colonel's orders to Captain Cherkasov. I think he picked me because I'm the youngest, and possibly because I'm a woman and chivalric instincts die slowly."

"Damn the man."

"Can you blame a father for wanting to protect his only child?" Her escort, it seemed, had no trouble discerning which man Katya meant.

"When it threatens my work, yes!"

The young woman's face twisted into a snarl.

"I think more is at stake here than your ability to collect more data, _Doctor_." She spat the last word at her like it was an insult.

Under the circumstances, it probably was.

That spark of guilt made Katya swallow the first hot words that came to mind. Instead, she snapped, "There's no time for this," and spun on her heel. She got four steps towards the door before her guard's hand clamped down on her forearm.

"I have my orders."

"Are your orders more important than the mission? You know why we're here. Veruschka can kill more fiends than your entire company ten times over. You know it, and Cherkasov knows it; that's why your mission is to distract and divide the fiends and support her. She's already been operating longer than she ever has before." The soldier's face flickered with anger again, probably at "operating" ( _hypocrite!_ ) but Katya ignored it and rushed on. "If she can't control her Blue Blood in the heat of battle—or worse yet, if she absorbs too much from killing fiends—"

"You don't think you can save her, do you?"

"It's not about saving her." _Liar._ "It's about making sure she can function for as long as possible, to make sure that we break up this army of fiends. Her sacrifice— _your_ sacrifice—is pointless if it doesn't accomplish what it needs to do."

Competing duties warred on the soldier's face.

"Give me the injector," she said after a couple of seconds. "I'll get it to her while you escape."

It actually wasn't a bad compromise, but Katya wasn't interested in compromise.

"Have you ever used one before? Do you know the correct dose? Do you know where and how to inject the stabilizing agent so that it goes where it's needed? It doesn't go into the bloodstream, you know, and Veruschka's internal anatomy doesn't match up with a human's any more."

She could see the soldier waver.

"Now, _come on_. Get me safely to Veruschka and then you can do whatever you feel you need to. But this comes first, or Cherkasov's orders might as well be to a corpse."

They probably would be, anyway.


	3. Chapter 3

_The problem is not the body. While we have no workable_

 _selection process for hosts with suitable spiritual energies_

 _to endure the Blue Blood, surgical modification can produce_

 _acceptable compatibility levels in test subjects. The issue is,_

 _rather, the soul. Demons are said to be creatures of emotion,_

 _and it is through emotion that the Blue Blood overwhelms_

 _the subjects' human will, degrading them into a fiend. It_

 _is my contention that if the project is to ever produce viable_

 _results without the pre-established selective infrastructure_

 _of the Curia training academies, then it will be necessary to_

 _permanently suppress the emotional response of the subjects._

-Excerpt from Special Operations (Anti-Fiend)

Group Half-Demon Project Report #172,

Dr. Ekaterina Travnikova

It was as if Ruenheid had stepped into a hellscape. Blazing fires illuminated the night with the roaring and cracking of a greedy inferno, hungry for fresh fuel to burn. Human and fiendish screams alike joined the cacophony with the drumbeat of gunfire as the percussion line of the demonic symphony. Seeing it, hearing it, she was hurled back into her past, to the fall of Eurulm, her family's flight through the streets.

There were, however, two key differences. One was the lack of civilians. There were no terrified throngs in the streets, no wailing children, no innocents who could be nothing but victims desperately praying that the fiends would look elsewhere and pass them by. Wherever the people of Mirny were, if they'd been evacuated beforehand or hidden in some safe location or _dontthinkitno_ long since fallen, they weren't here now, leaving only battle, not panicked flight.

The other was that Ruenheid was no longer a scared, helpless child.

Stealth had never been her best attribute even when she was trying her hardest, and the ground was far too unfamiliar for her to be at her peak. A pack of a dozen shadow wolves caught her scent and came bounding at her from the embers of a burnt-out building, rage and panic consuming them. The fiends were used to bringing down their human prey in the chase, catching them as they fled in terror. They were not prepared for Rue to tear the Spirit Sword Odr from its sheath on her back or for the massive blade to burst into blue flame.

Less than a minute later, the fiends all lay dead before her.

It was only a tiny victory, though, amid the destruction. Still, she couldn't help but feel a touch of satisfaction. Her efforts had made the world a little cleaner through direct action, saving lives those fiends might have taken in the future.

That was why Ruenheid had left the Curia and joined the Lourdes Order. The Curia was too eager to compromise, too eager to take the easy path in return for some allegedly greater good. That they intended to sacrifice the "Bride of Time" (whoever that was) to hold off the Moon Queen had been, for her, the last straw. You didn't defeat evil by compromising with it! With the Order, her missions were straightforward and her conscience clear. Fine the scientist and save her—and as many other people as she could manage, of course, but that one especially.

Though one thing did tease at the back of Ruenheid's mind as she hewed into the next knot of fiends to notice her. Lady Loergwlith's prophecy had mentioned that the scientist had brought "her creation" to battle the fiends. Progress was all well and good—necessary, even—but it was commonly understood that the Curia's fiend researchers would go too far in pursuit of the next breakthrough. How much farther, then, would someone go when they were working only for a nation's glory without the Curia's purity of purpose?

 _Or do I have it backwards?_ Someone fanatical about a goal, a higher purpose, might go beyond any limit to pursue it. What was worse, corruption, or purity in pursuit of darkness?

She supposed that she'd find the answer when she found the scientist and get to see for herself what form the creation took.

~X X X~

Veruschka exhaled heavily as the last immediate enemy crumpled to the ground. She'd never fought for so hard or so long, not even during testing, while Dr. Travnikova was establishing her body's limits and how well the adaptations to the Blue Blood had taken root. Every part of her body hurt, from muscles pushed too hard to the bruises and cuts she'd taken in battle, to a deeper, more lasting pain in her heart and viscera, spreading out and pulsing just under her skin.

 _I am failing_ , she observed. The thought was cold, dispassionate, an observation of data as remote as a machinist surveying the workings of a steam engine.

Two soldiers came running into the square. Another man, this one wearing sergeant's stripes, came forward to meet them. Veruschka knew none of their names; she'd been asleep on the way to the operation site and personal knowledge was not necessary for her to fulfill her mission. It was not as if she could mistake humans for fiends or vice versa.

Many of the soldiers had died already, in desperate battle against the horde of fiends. It was a duty she shared with them, to give her utmost for the sake of winning the fight against the blue-blood monsters. She wondered what it would be like to die for the sake of the fight, and whether it would matter if her death was in vain or not. Did it matter to the humans?

"Report!" the sergeant barked at the newcomers.

"They're breaking on the right flank, scattering," one of them said.

"I'm not surprised. This isn't like them, acting in such numbers. There's got to be something driving them."

"If so, then it's still out there, because the center's still holding. They're pulling together, and—"

"They're here," Veruschka interrupted.

She'd seen the fiends' approach with her half-demon's enhanced senses, but it was equally obvious to the humans in the next instant as a house on the far side of the square was blown apart in a thunderous explosion, foundation-stones hurled like cannonballs and timbers spinning end-over-end. Only the fact that there were only six human soldiers left in the square explained why no one had been hit and seriously injured by the debris.

Brilliant green lightning played across the shattered shell of the destroyed home, and through it stepped a massive beast. It was green, too, like a verdigrised copper statue but for the tawny mane that shone gold in the light of the burning buildings. It was at least a dozen feet tall, humanoid but for its leonine head, and massively muscled. It fixed its seething gaze on Veruschka, then threw back its head and roared, an unmistakable challenge to battle.

In the fiend's wake came other giants, not quite so huge but at nine feet tall intimidating enough, their faces all the more horrific by the rough, almost half-finished nature of their features. They fanned out to the left and right as the leonine fiend charged, not joining their leader in its assault.

 _It wants to fight me alone_ , Veruschka thought. Somehow it had recognized her for what she was—as the greatest threat, the most prolific destroyer of its hordes, if not necessarily the specifics—and it wanted, no, _needed_ the personal confrontation.

She was happy to give it what it wanted. The six giant fiends together would have been a serious threat, particularly as weakened as she was. One on one meant that she had a chance. The human troops, too, seemed to recognize this, fanning out to try to engage the five smaller giants. Their situation was likely hopeless on its own, but if Veruschka could take out the enemy leader she might be able to then help with their fight as well. At least, that was what they could pin their hopes on.

Then there was no more time to analyze or hope, for the fiend was upon her, right arm swinging in a running punch that would have crumpled an armored cruiser's plate. Veruschka ducked low under the swing and dove forward, slashing out with her right-hand blade's spikes to carve across the meat of the fiend's thigh. Blue blood spattered, and she pivoted to her right as its momentum carried it past her, spinning to ram a thrusting punch at the fiend's lower back.

Only, the fiend had been ready for her, planting one foot to halt its terrific charge cold and mule-kicking directly back to meet Veruschka head-on.

The impact was crushing, launching her off her feet to fly a half-dozen yards, where she crashed to the ground and rolled through the dust.

 _It's nearly as fast as I am,_ she thought, fighting to stand, then corrected herself. _No, not "nearly."_ She was too slowed by injury and exhaustion. She could not simply outpace it.

The fiend was already charging Veruschka again, leaving her barely any time to plan any further. She ducked a vicious swipe of its claws at the last second, then weaved aside to avoid a second blow that came so close she could feel the rush of air even through her leather outfit. _Too close!_ Its size was a disadvantage for it, its arms too high to easily strike something as small as Veruschka without bending its back and therefore slowing it down. That was the only reason she'd been able to dodge.

 _But if it realizes that, then—_

She didn't have time to finish the thought before its foot was coming off the ground, and she was forced to launch herself back to avoid the kick.

To Veruschka's right, one of the giants fell, blue leaking from over two dozen wounds stippling its torso. To her left, a soldier was pulled limb-from-limb, screaming. Deep within her mind, something pulsed, something tiny trying to be born, but was quashed, starved, before it could burst out as any emotion other than hate for what was doing these things.

Calm will was her best weapon. The lion-fiend would have had her if it had struck with a quick kick, but instead it had tried a roundhouse, powerful enough to crush her but too slow to connect.

A brutal, two-fisted overhead slam shattered paving-stones, but she ducked it easily and it brought the fiend's face down into close range; she fired her stake driver as it connected and the blade tore a deep gouge in the thing's cheek just below the eye. It reeled, roaring in pain, and she hit it twice more before dropping to the ground to avoid a flailing swing meant to fend her off but delivered with the kind of force that would have torn her in two on impact.

 _Rage. Pain. Fear._ Emotion was consuming the fiend, and taking away its ability to fight. It had all the speed, all the power it needed to win, but past the very first moments of the fight hadn't used any of it.

The titanic swing carried it stumbling past Veruschka, and she drove both shoes into the back of its right knee with all the strength she could muster. The joint crumpled, and the fiend crashed to its knees.

 _Now!_

Veruschka spun into a crouch, then sprang into the air, drawing her hand back, as she did channeling the power of her half-demon blood that pounded like a hammer-blow through her veins with every heartbeat, and spun into a power-dive. Green lightning crackled over the fiend's body and exploded outward in a wave, washing over and through Veruschka as she hurtled down, but the force given by her own power carried her through it and her stake driver rammed both points into the fiend's skill. The creature and its hunter crashed to the ground together, but Veruschka had no idea that her enemy's corpse was dissolving into a pool of Blue Blood, for she was already unconscious.

~X X X~

The square was all but silent when they found them, the crackling of the flames and the shrieking timbers of houses in their death-throes all that was left, though from the south and west the occasional sounds of battle could still be heard, like the last stragglers at a party unaware that the meaningful part of the revels were done.

Veruschka lay in the center of the square, limbs twisted and folded by the way she'd fallen into a contortionist's pose no one would have chosen for themselves. She was ringed by fallen bodies, a rough circle fifteen feet away from her like some kind of offering to a fallen queen. Some of the soldiers were grotesquely mutilated, barely even recognizable as human, while others might have been taken at a glance for sleepers in quiet repose. Mixed in with the soldiers were at least two of the hulking black forms of giants, slain enemies to add to the offering.

They were morbidly poetic images drawn from a distant past, but the fear that gripped Katya was real and immediate. That her mind kept calling up funerary symbolism was no more than the manifestation of that fear. Injector in hand, she ran directly for Veruschka.

"Is she dead?" her escort called even as Katya was crouching next to the girl.

"I don't know yet," she snapped back. "Stop interrupting and let me work."

There was no rise and fall of her chest; if she was breathing it was shallow and imperceptible. Katya grabbed the zipper of Veruschka's high collar and yanked it down six inches, then pushed her hand underneath so she could press two fingers to the pulse in her neck.

 _There!_

It was thready, weak, but then again Veruschka's blood flow had never been quite like a normal human's. The Blue Blood coursed her system in ways other than the blood vessels for ordinary human circulation, producing odd symptoms even when she was in peak functioning status. Though she was nothing like that now; the exposed skin of face and throat showed creeping violet-black filaments, her hybrid blood beginning to run out of control. Katya could only hope that the stabilization serum could rein it in before the corruption became too much for Veruschka's body to handle. She thumbed back the injector's safety lock, only to be cut off by a litany of screamed profanity.

Katya's head snapped around to see what her escort was so agitated about, and when she did her gut twisted at once. _How stupid of me!_ She was supposed to be an expert in fiend research, so how could she have missed something so obvious? A dead fiend's body returned almost wholly to the Blue Blood once it was slain. The "corpses" of the giants were, therefore, not corpses at all, but living fiends, fiends that were now rising for the new prey they detected.

"Keep them off me!"

The soldier didn't need Katya's orders; she was already leveling her gun at the nearest fiend and fired as fast as she could, putting silver bullets anointed with holy oil into it. Dismissing the fight as irrelevant to her patient's need, Katya turned back to Veruschka. She yanked the zipper down further so she could bare the rest of the girl's neck and her chest down to the upper slope of her breasts, then grabbed one lapel and pulled it to the side, exposing Veruschka's right collarbone. She pressed the injector's point into the hollow made by Veruschka's clavicle, then pulled the trigger. The needle-point punched through flesh, the injector at once beginning to pump the contents of its reservoir vial into Veruschka.

"Come on…" Katya muttered under her breath as the lavender serum was slowly forced into the girl's body. Part of her didn't even know why she was so agitated; she'd been frank enough with her father when he'd ordered her to send Veruschka on this mission in the first place. The length of time spent fighting, the damage taken from the enemy, the Blue Blood absorbed, they all added up to a functional death sentence. If they had her entire laboratory here and a full team of assistants it might not have been able to make any difference.

And yet…

That hadn't stopped her from coming on this journey, though, and it wasn't stopping her from trying her best now. She owed Veruschka that at least, Veruschka and all the others who _weren't_ there now because they hadn't made it that far. The ones who never even got the chance to die on the battlefield because they'd ended as experimental fodder, test data drawn from failures. To say nothing of the ones to come, the inevitable replacements already being "recruited" and tested.

There was a wet, squelching sound from behind Katya, and she tried to ignore what it might mean, but her sense of dedication couldn't shut out her nerves forever, and by the time the injector was three-quarters empty, she glanced back over her shoulder.

She shouldn't have looked. Or else, she should have been looking all along. Her escort was down, almost certainly dead, and the two giant fiends were less than ten feet away, advancing slowly and methodically. With every step, their hearts pulsed, lungs swelled and throbbed, glowing with baleful violet light, the same light that shown from the openings of eyes and mouth in the half-finished features of their faces.

As smoothly as she could, as she couldn't risk disturbing the injector, Katya slipped her empty left hand under her jacket and took out a bottle from an inner pocket. Its contents were a bright, almost phosphorescent green that sloshed when she drew back her arm.

Though she was off-balance and using the wrong hand, Katya was still able to hit the nearer giant with her throw, a mark of just how close the thing had come. The fragile glass shattered, releasing the fluid in a puff of smoke as it began reacting to the contact with air, becoming a powder that clung to whatever it touched. It wasn't easy to find a poison that worked on fiends; the recipe for this one had been bought from a black-market trader who'd supposedly stolen it from the Curia's laboratories.

Katya didn't just wait and hope that the chemical would finish off the fiend, though. Instead, she reached across her body, desperately trying to get to her right-hand coat pocket. Her shoulder pulsed with pain as she tried to stretch far enough, but she managed to catch her fingertips on the edge of the pocket and pulled the open coat across her body, letting her reach inside. She nearly fumbled the gun trying to get it out, her hand grabbing the top of it first so the hammer jammed hard into her palm, then getting the barrel caught as she tried to get it out of the pocket. At last, she managed to pull it free, her hand wrapped around the revolver's walnut butt.

She even managed to fire a shot before one of the giants kicked her.

The blow wasn't anything special, not some kind of trained strike the way that the soldiers practiced. With the fiend's power, it didn't have to be. Katya felt the thing's oversized foot crash into her left shoulder and arm, but her mind registered the breaking-twig sound of snapping bones before the pain made an impact on her consciousness. She went flying from the force, not just tumbling away but actually hurled through the air, and time seemed to take on an eerie, gelid quality where she could chart her progress, like her soul had been left behind and was struggling to catch up with her body.

Then she hit the ground, her right side, back, and the point of her hip slamming into the paving stones, followed a half-second later by the side of her head, and reality exploded in on her like a thunderbolt. Pain burst through her everywhere from shattered bones and torn flesh. She didn't know if she was still even holding the gun; the force of impact had been so savage to her shoulder and upper arm that her left hand might as well no longer be attached to her body. Somehow she'd actually kept hold of the injector; she forced her eyes to focus on its tip and saw that the needle was still there. Thankfully, it had pulled out instead of snapping off in Veruschka's body.

Not that it mattered in any practical way. She'd gotten the full dose of the stabilizing serum into Veruschka, but without any way to administer proper follow-up treatment, even if the fiends left the unconscious half-demon alone she wasn't going to survive. Unless the Colonel arranged to send some kind of retrieval team to check after the fact? That wasn't impossible. A slim thread, maybe, but slim threads were all the hope that Katya had at this point, as delicate as a spider's web glistening with dew in the morning, like the web she'd trapped Veruschka and all the others in—

 _Concussion_ , she realized from her drifting thoughts. In a way she was grateful; the disconnect from reality was probably all that was keeping her from being overwhelmed by the pain of her multiple injuries. The shoulder was especially bad; the medical doctor in her was telling her that the subclavian artery must have been severed, which if true meant that she was bleeding out.

People talked all the time about "risking their life" being worth it to achieve some goal, but that was just that: _risk_. Katya doubted that they'd be as bold in their declarations if it meant the certainty of sacrifice. Had she, herself, really accepted what she was getting into? Had the soldiers who'd marched so grimly to their fates?

 _If so, they were better than me._ Defending something they thought was important instead of being driven to it by pique, pride, or shame.

Then again, the soldiers had succeeded in their aim, hadn't they? Broken the hordes of fiends, left them scattering back into the night where they might threaten, but only as individuals. Veruschka, too, had done her work, her sacrifice what they had made her for.

That's what sacrifice meant, after all. Give of oneself to accomplish something more important than the personal loss, even if that loss was one's own life. It wasn't sacrifice at all if it ended in vain. It was just…loss.

Failure.

The fiends were not bothering pursuing Katya. Instead, they had stopped at Verushka, looking down at her as if trying to figure out what they'd found. So they weren't passing her up after all. Even that last, futile ember of hope was about to be snuffed. The Night held no remorse or mercy for Katya.

Until there was a wordless shout, a spark of light seemed to shine through one of the fiends, and a searing crimson bolt blasted through the monster's torso from behind.

~X X X~

Ruenheid didn't like attacking enemies from their back. Her idea of being a knight was firmly rooted in ideals of nobility and justice; the Warrior of Light did not creep around like a snake in the grass, pouncing when the enemy was unprepared! She didn't hesitate to throw that pride away when someone was in danger, though. Ruenheid had been too late to save the woman who looked like a doctor from being knocked away from her patient, but at least she was able to strike before the fiends could further hurt the fallen girl.

The second fiend turned to face her as its ally was blown apart. Rue brought Odr up into a guard position, the scarlet flame of its blast returning to the more usual blue. She had to finish this quickly; the doctor might well be the scientist she was there to save, and that kick had been nasty, the kind of thing that would seriously injure even a trained knight, let alone a normal person without the spiritual power to block or absorb damage. Ruenheid couldn't waste time fighting while the woman needed help! Without hesitation, she charged.

The fiend didn't hesitate, either, lurching towards her with lumbering steps. As Ruenheid neared it, it raised one foot and stomped, the violet flames exploding down through its body and bursting out around it in a fiery burst. Rue flinched as the heat washed over her, and she felt it cling to her like hot, sticky oil, but she shook it off before it could catch light and start to continuously burn her. She slashed with the Spirit Sword, and Odr bit deep into the fiend's left arm. The shock of the impact surged up her arms as the blade nearly cleaved through the fiend's limb above the elbow. Rue wrenched her sword free and slashed at the giant's leg, only for it to glance off the bone-like sheathing of the limb.

It swung at her with its uninjured arm, and Ruenheid barely got Odr up in time to block, using the broad flat of the weapon like a shield. The fiend's paw-like hand rebounded from the azure energy crackling around the sword, and Ruenheid seized the opening. She whirled Odr up over her head and back, then brought it down in a massive overhand cut at the giant's head. It was, perhaps, foolishly aggressive: if it had missed, if the fiend had blocked or dodged, she would have been exposed and vulnerable to nearly any counter.

She didn't miss.

Glowing with bright blue fury, Odr cleaved down though the fiend's head, splitting it cleanly in two, then continued down into its body to bisect its heart. A screeching cry burst from the two halves of its mouth, and its body dissolved into a shower of Blue Blood.

Ruenheid panted for breath, sucking in air in great, heaving gasps. She'd put a lot of herself into those few strikes; the strength of her spirit was to turn the force of her emotions into power, but the exertion still took its toll. But the situation was too urgent to coddle herself; she ran forward to see who could be saved.

The girl on the ground seemed all right, Rue saw with relief. At least, she was breathing, and her injuries looked to be minor. Reassured, Ruenheid went over to the woman she thought might be her scientist quarry.

"Damn," she spat reflexively, not even pausing to think.

"That bad…then?" The woman's voice was bitter; she spoke in Rue's own language, perhaps thinking that people were more likely to swear in their native tongue.

"I have to get you some help."

"Unless your healing is…as magic as your sword, I…don't think it will matter. Or are you hiding…a surgical team under…that jacket?"

Ruenheid ground her teeth. She actually _did_ have some ability to heal injuries, but nothing like what she could see.

"I was sent to save you."

"When you get…older, you'll get used…to failure." The woman's gaze drifted past Rue. "What about her?"

"The girl? She seems all right."

The scientist smiled, then, if faintly.

"That's something, at least."

"There's no time for talking. I have to get you to the Lourdes Order, and—"

"The Lourdes Order?" Her eyebrows went up in surprise. "That explains it. Who else but…a pack of innocents would…wander onto someone else's…battlefield on a…rescue mission?" She laughed, then convulsed and began to hack as the spasmodic movement aggravated her injuries. She spat out blood before she could talk again.

"If you want to save someone, then take…Veruschka."

"She's not even seriously hurt. Your people will save her. I can get her to shelter, but it's you that I need to protect."

"I'll be…dead in five minutes and we…both know it. And they'll just let… _her_ die, too. Too hard to stabilize…outside a lab. And without me, the project…They'll need…to pick successors, reorganize. Easier just…to replace her when…it's up and running again."

"Let her die? Stabilize? Replace? What _is_ she?"

"Half…demon…"

Ruenheid flinched. She'd known that the Curia's scientists were working on things like that; everyone at the academy had heard of the legendary Arnice, after all. But this woman wasn't Curia, at least not judging by the uniforms of the fallen soldiers. How could whomever she belonged to produce a viable half-demon? It shouldn't have been possible!

Lady Loergwlith's words echoed in Ruenheid's thoughts.

 _There you will find a scientist who has brought her creation to battle fiends. Save her._

Not save "her" the scientist, but "her" the creation?

"You people…split off from…the Curia. Surely…you can do…something for…Veruschka if…anyone can?"

Rue turned and looked back at the girl. She looked tiny: short, slim, petite, almost fragile despite the exotic weapons she held.

"Of course we can!" she declared, even though she had no idea if it was true.

"Good." She coughed again. "It's nice…at least not…to end with a failure…"

Her voice trailed off. The spark hadn't quite vanished from her eyes, though that was near enough. It was just that there wasn't anything else left for her to make the effort to say.

Ruenheid hung her sword over her back, bent, and scooped the half-demon up in her arms.

She hadn't gotten more than hundred yards before Veruschka's eyes flicked open.

"I don't know you."

"I'm Ruenheid, with the Lourdes Order." The girl squirmed, and Rue had to hold on tightly. "Gah! Stop wriggling around or I'll drop you!"

"I can walk."

"Oh, quit moving. That doctor lady said that you needed help in a lab."

"Dr. Travnikova?"

"I guess so. She didn't tell me her name. She just asked me to save you. I guess that's why I was sent here, to bring you back to the Order."

"That doesn't sound like her. Or maybe it does. If I can be replaced, then losing me to your Order isn't that important."

Her voice was very flat, under control, without any hint of surprise or confusion.

"Replaced? That's awful!" Rue yelped, using very much the opposite of Veruschka's tone. "People can't just be replaced!"

"I see. So resources are scarce for the Lourdes Order. Saving me would be efficient for you, then."

"Gah! That's not it at all!"

"Oh? That doesn't sound very productive, tactically."

"Arrrrgh! If we're going to be comrades-in-arms, then you have to understand how justice works."

"Comrades?"

"Yeah! I mean, if you want that. We're not going to force you or anything, but, you're one of us now, Veruschka."

"Hm." She thought it over for a couple of seconds. "I think…that I like that."


End file.
